


D-Days: Seven Scenes from the Zombie Apocalypse

by Deifire



Category: The Sandman
Genre: Multi, Zombies, sandman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/pseuds/Deifire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which someone succeeds where Roderick Burgess failed many years ago, and there are consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	D-Days: Seven Scenes from the Zombie Apocalypse

_"We wanted to capture Death."  
"What? You wanted Death? Then count yourself lucky for the sake of your species and your petty planet that you did NOT succeed...that instead you snared Death's younger brother...you'll never know how lucky you were."_  
\--Alex Burgess and Morpheus, Sandman 1

 

  
**Delirium**  
"What's the name of the word for when words come to an end? You know, forever and ever and for always?" asks the young woman with the wild, multicolored hair.

Chloe Sullivan has long ago stopped paying strict attention. She's just trying to focus through the fever, hoping the throbbing in her arm from where the dead thing's teeth marks are still fresh goes away. Hoping that the moaning in the hallway stops soon, and that the Larissa woman or someone else comes back to give the all-clear. She clutches the image of Bast around her neck and prays. It's not doing much good.

"It _is_ words, isn't it? Or worlds. I always get those confused," the woman is saying. "There was a boy once who had people living in his head. One of them was my brother someday." She reminds Chloe of someone she met a long time ago. She tries to think back and only pulls up a vague memory of an airplane.

There had been rumors about the strange new sickness going around campus. A new strain of rabies, most called it at first. A few isolated cases here and there, a few soundbites on the news. There was that other word, of course, even in the beginning, but nobody really believed it.

Student Health had passed out guides about safer sex and proper hygiene, but for the most part life and classes had gone on. Chloe had midterms to study for and an anthropology paper to write, and hadn't been paying the strictest attention. Then her roommate Lisa had come home from a club one night, pale and staggering. Chloe hadn't seen the teeth marks at first. Had naturally assumed too much to drink and only even thought about the new sickness when Lisa didn't get up the next morning.

She didn't believe in the living dead until what was left of Lisa had made its way back to their room a couple days after the funeral and tried to attack her.

The girl next to Chloe is murmuring something about telephones and fish and a man with a raven. And her sister. Always her sister. "Someone took her," the girl insists. "She's not here, and that's why nobody else is going away. I used to have a doggie." Chloe tries to say something reassuring, but nothing comes out.

The survivors on campus are making their last stand in the art history building. A grad student named Larissa, a nondescript woman with straight brown hair and large glasses seems to be in charge now. Mostly because when the first of the undead came, when everybody else was panicking and screaming, this was the woman who calmly took it all in, said, "Right," then pulled a large knife out of her backpack and decapitated three walking corpses before anybody else had time to react.

The girl with the wild hair pats Chloe's hand. "It's okay. Well, um, it's not. But it won't be long now."

Chloe shuts her eyes one last time. She hopes someone is there to stop her when she opens them again.

 

**Despair**  
It's funny, thinks Rose Walker, that the plague of the living dead would be only the second worst thing that has ever happened to her.

Jed would be proud. She's finally come out of her room.

"Kill it," somebody had said to her once when she was still pregnant with Gilbert. "Kill it before it breaks your heart." Or had that been something she dreamed?

He had broken her heart after all. Not by doing anything other than being the son she loved, then by being in the wrong crosswalk at the wrong time, when the wrong drunk driver had sped around a corner and destroyed Rose Walker's entire world.

She swallows another of the pills the doctor gave her.

Yes, she's finally come out of her room, but if she's honest with herself, she doubts her brother had sitting on Gilbert Jedidiah Walker's grave daring the end to come in mind.

Jed had shouted at her, accused her of walking around like a zombie and upsetting their mother, before she'd finally given up and shut herself upstairs so her grieving would no longer upset anyone. Now that she's seen the real thing, she thinks Jed was right in a way. Only she'd only felt dead inside, while these things really are.

She must have heard about it on the news at some point when the dead stopped dying. When they began to infect the living. Jed had disappeared by then. Her mother had long ago given up trying to make Rose see reason.

When she hears the first low moan and slow, shuffling steps coming near the grave, Rose almost smiles for the first time in a very long time.

Cold hands grab her from behind.

**Desire**  
Robbie Gadling watches as Gwen takes out the walking corpse. Shot to the head is the only way to do it. Damage the brain and they stop moving. Nothing else seems to phase them.

He'd been making contingency plans for various scenarios for lifetimes now. It's the only sane thing to do when there's a better-than-reasonable chance of winding up the last man on earth. What to do in the case of chemical warfare. What to do in case of nuclear holocaust. What do to in the event of a worldwide return to superstition in the face of disaster when you're sentenced to be burned as a witch. Again.

He has to admit, he hadn't seen the zombie apocalypse coming.

In all his considerable years on the planet, Hob Gadling has been through more than a few plagues, cold, hunger, the death of damn near everyone he's even known, and he still desired, more than anything, to live. But this is different.

He's seen what happens to the infected, and knows this isn't how he wants to spend forever. To become a cold, mindless thing, not dead, but not alive in any proper sense of the word. No longer Hob Gadling.

What's worse, what if he did become infected and still couldn't be killed? He'd be an unstoppable thing, doomed to pass the plague onto others until the end of the entire bloody world.

He and Gwen fled to a particular secluded hideout he'd set up in the wilderness a small while back. There's a stockpile of food and weapons and plenty of land for growing things. They eat, sleep, hunt, tend to their gardens, make love, and wait. Some of the dead things still find their way here, but not many, and so far they've been able to handle it. If that stops being the case, there's always underground.

Or is it time to call the woman he met many years ago? Ask to take her hand?

He's so lost in thought he almost doesn't notice the movement on the ground by Gwen's feet. One of the legless ones. Cut off their limbs and they just keep going. "Gwen!" he shouts, as he fires and puts a bullet into the thing's head.

Gwen leaps out of the way just in time. "Thanks," she says, and smiles at him, once she's got her breath back.

"I thought I'd lost you," he says.

She reaches toward him, kisses him deeply. "Not until the end of the world," she says, as she steps back to look at him knowingly. He takes her hand and they go off to find some place safe and secluded. It's their ritual nowadays, after one of these encounters. The most powerful way they know of celebrating life in the midst of so much death.

He follows Gwen, and knows he's going to take his chances. After all, he has so much to live for.

 

**Destruction**  
The gun fires. "Got one, Mom!" Alvie calls. Hazel McNamara's son is growing up to be the best shot in their ragtag anti-zombie army. She's proud of him, fiercely proud, and it's only in the night, when she's alone with Fox, that she allows herself any tears over what's become of his childhood.

They're a crazy band. Some are professional--what's left of the American troops in the Midwest, police officers, the occasional costumed hero--but most are civilians, like Hazel and her family.

And then there's the red-haired man. He joined their group a few days ago when they were hunting the dead across Nebraska, and appointed himself company cook.

Hazel watches him sometimes, and knows she's staring at him in the way she hates it when people stare at Foxglove. That "Don't I know you from somewhere?" look.

She'd given up believing he was a former celebrity a few days ago.

The first time she catches him alone, in the middle of preparing dinner, she decides to damn the consequences. "You could do something," she says, and makes a gesture to encompass the weary soldiers, the burning bodies of the undead, the sorry place the world has become.

He glances up from the onion he's been slicing and fixes Hazel with a look she can't read. "I am doing something," he says.

"But you could do _more_," Hazel insists, knowing that she's treading on dangerous ground.

The man only shakes his head.

 

**Dream**  
Jed is in a dream he hasn't had since childhood. He's watching a group of bright pink gerbils playing happily in a crystal cell inside a circle.

"I wonder what this does?" he asks aloud, pushing a level that is inexplicably labeled "Magdalene Grimoire."

Suddenly, the gerbils are outside their cage. "Oh you are so cute," says Jed. "You must play with me. Come, I will introduce you to Rose and Gilbert."

As before when he has this dream, the number of gerbils starts to grow. And grow. He wonders why he always forgets this part until it happens. Soon there are so many, he is starting to worry. But this isn't the dream from his childhood. The gerbils multiply, like always. But then the gerbils change, and begin to morph into rotting corpses. One has Rose's face.

"Oh, help!" Jed calls. "I do not know what to do!"

And because this is not the dream of his childhood, Hector and Lyta Hall don't answer him. Only the raven that is suddenly sitting on his shoulder.

"You know exactly what to do, kid," it tells him. "Because this _is_ all your fault."

Jed glances toward the crystal cell when the gerbils had once been playing. Inside now there is only a single, naked woman with wild black hair and very pale skin.

She's the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life. And he knows he has a good reason for never, ever letting her out, but he can't remember it. He only knows that somehow it will make the zombies stop.

He begins to reach for the lever, but zombie Rose grabs him, sinks her teeth into his flesh, and he knows it is too late.

And then Jed wakes up.

**Death**  
It's been written by those who claim to know that there are a few ingredients needed to summon Death: a coin made from stone, a feather from an angel's wing, certain ritual words, among other things. It also takes a certain kind of power. Power that few mortals walking the earth possess.

It takes blood. Family blood.

Jed Walker doesn't know this. Jed has never met his grandfather.

All he knew was that he wanted more than anything else in the world to bring his nephew back and make Rose stop hurting. To that mad desire he'd added a few books borrowed from his sister's friend Paul McGuire in England, a few friends with dreams of magic and power, a whole lot of money to buy what he needed, and about a year's worth of preparation. In the end, he'd done it.

In the end, she'd smiled sadly from behind the walls of her prison and told him no.

He'd refused to free her, at first in the hope that she'd give in and give him what he wanted. Later, he kept her trapped out of fear. Even when the dead stopped dying, he'd begged, pleaded and refused to let her go.

Tonight, he changes his mind. No matter the consequence to him or his family, this cannot be allowed to continue.

He approaches the house where the entity he doesn't know is his aunt is bound. There are meant to be lights on. There are meant to be guards on duty. Instead, the place looks deserted. Some of the windows are smashed.

His subconscious gets it before the rest of his mind has a chance to catch up and he starts to run. He hears the moans behind him, and the shuffling dead feet of his former apprentice magicians. The dead move slowly. If he can just outrun them, he can come back in the morning with reinforcements. He'll have to confess, of course, but at last he can smash the glass prison, erase this circle, and end this entire nightmare.

He trips.

The zombies are on him before he can regain his feet.

In a dark basement, in a glass prison, inside a binding circle, Death waits.

**Destiny**  
The paths that lead to Destiny's garden are many, and the Thessalian is not surprised to cross one while walking the moon's road. She is, she has to admit to herself, somewhat surprised to glimpse the eldest of the Endless himself at the crossroads.

If the hooded figure knows of her presence, he does not acknowledge it. He only walks along, reading his book. She wonders if the end of humanity itself is written there. It would be foolish to ask him, of course. He would never give her an answer, and she's only wasting time lingering here in Destiny's Garden.

For there are ways to survive even the end of a world, and sometimes they involve getting out while the getting is good. She's bargained dearly for this path, and some day she may even have to pay the price.

She takes off her glasses, wipes them on her shirt, and continues her journey away from this plane.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for penmage in the 2008 apocalyptothon.


End file.
